The rose rosette disease mite didn’t stop with wild roses - now, it threatens the wider ornamental rose population. Photo by Gary Bauchan, Ron Ochoa and Chris Pooley/USDA – ARS, Electron & Confocal Microscopy Unit, Beltsville, MD. Scanning electron microscope image of the “Rose Rosette Disease Mite”. At the same time, the mites feed on the host’s juices, and the rose plant eventually dies. In the 1970s, this mite and a virus it carries were used as a biocontrol agent to kill wild roses in farming areas.The virus causes a rose bush to produce too many buds, which the plant can’t support. The rose rosette disease mite ( Phyllocoptes fructiphilus) is a good mite gone bad. Check out just a few of the mites Ochoa and Bauchan have studied below. Some mites are helpful, benign creatures. Others, not so much. So whatever they were doing at the time we froze them, that’s what they are doing in the microscope.” “Now, the other way is to freeze them in liquid nitrogen. “Most of the time in an electron microscope, you have to put mites in a fixative and kill them, and then they tend to shrivel a little,” said Bauchan.
Some of their most detailed photographs come from the lab’s low-temperature scanning electron microscope, a technology that literally captures a moment frozen in time. So far, the team’s images have landed on the covers of more than 30 scientific journals. Armed with an arsenal of various microscopes, he and his colleagues take intimate looks at mites, fungi, bacteria and other microscope minions. Gary Bauchan works closely with Ochoa as director of the microscopy unit. Walking all around, feeling like they are the center of the planet while they are surrounded by mites.” “In the beginning that they didn’t really need a large size, and they are still around because they are escaping our ability to see them,” he said. Ochoa credits the mites’ unseen dimensions for their ongoing success. Photo by Gary Bauchan, Ron Ochoa and Chris Pooley/USDA – ARS, Electron & Confocal Microscopy Unit
The Spinosaurus mite is named after the Spinosaurus dinosaur because of its enlarged back fin. That’s barely one third the width of a human hair. The tiniest mite on record is 82 microns long. Ticks - the blood-sucking, Lyme disease-carrying subclass cousin of mites - are considered the largest of the kind, but most mites are much smaller. NewsHour paid a visit to the facility to see what’s under everyone’s skin. The facility also plays host to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History’s mite collection that contains more than a million different mite specimens representing more than 10 thousand species. Ochoa works for the USDA’s Electron and Confocal Microscopy Unit in Beltsville, Maryland, an agricultural research facility that allows scientists from around the world to get high-resolution images of the mites they are studying. Almost every single plant has one to three mites. Department of Agriculture Entomologist Ron Ochoa. “There are at least between 3 and 5 million species of mites, and that is a very conservative number,” said mite expert and U.S. Mites are arachnids, much like spiders and scorpions, and the microscopic creatures are among the oldest and most plentiful invertebrates on the planet. From the tea we drink, to the water we swim in, to the beds we sleep upon, millions of minuscule mites share our wide world.
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